In The Things they Carried, Tim O'Brien uses vivid imagery to convey difficult emotional realities. For example, in the story "The Things they Carried," Lieutenant Jimmy Cross receives a good-luck charm in the form of a pebble shaped like a small egg from his girlfriend. His girlfriend, Martha, relates that the pebble came from the part of the shoreline where the coast and the water come together and then separate, implying that she and Jimmy are apart yet together. Jimmy Cross, touching the pebble, has a vision of what Martha looked like on the shore:
"Her feet would be brown and bare, the toenails unpainted, the eyes chilly and somber like the ocean in March... He imagined a pair of shadows moving along the strip of sand where things came together but also separated" (page numbers vary by edition).
Jimmy Cross is tormented by jealousy and longing for his girlfriend, and O'Brien's image of what Cross pictures in his head captures this longing, homesickness, and dread. Rather than simply narrating how much Jimmy Cross misses Martha, the intimate image of her bare feet, the eyes as chilly as March, and the pair of shadows (implying with an image that Jimmy fears Martha has another boyfriend) capture the essence of his longing. His feelings are to some degree ineffable, so the image of the shoreline with the waves rising and receding captures the complexity of Jimmy Cross's thoughts in a way that pure narration could not.
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